REAR WINDOW

Hitchcock/USA/1954

REAR WINDOW is about the very act of watching movies. Like Jeff (Jimmy Stewart)—a man laid up in a body cast in a wheelchair—we, too, sit, as if trapped in the theater.

REAR WINDOW is about watching.

Have we become a nation of voyeurs, as Stella (Thelma Ritter) asks Jeff? (How else can one explain the phenomenon of reality television?)

When it was released in 1954, REAR WINDOW caused at least one critic to complain that James Stewart's character was nothing but a “peeping Tom.”

Director Alfred Hitchcock responded:  "Sure, he's a snooper, but aren't we all? I'll bet you that nine out of 10 people, if they see a woman across the courtyard undressing for bed, or even a man puttering around in his room, will stay and look."

That is the point of Hitchcock’s movie: We may not care to admit it, but we've always been a nation of peeping Toms. To prove it, Hitchcock makes us all voyeurs along with Stewart's housebound character.

 We know it's wrong to "spy on" others, but when Jeff believes he has discovered that a murder has taken place, we feel complicit in the discovery which assuages at least some of our guilt. When the killer spies Jeff spying on him--and comes after Jeff--we are as trapped in the darkened theater as Jeff is in the wheelchair. (This is just one reason why movies--at least great movies--are meant to be seen on big, theater screens. Only when the screen is big enough to obliterate everything else, and when the theater borders on pitch black, are you seeing the movie as the filmmaker meant it to be seen. At the moment of watching a film, that film and that film only should be your universe. No phones. No fools. No pets. No cigarettes—unless, of course, it’s the exquisite face of a Grace Kelly doing the smoking.)

In the 1980 serio-comic BEING THERE, the Peter Sellers character--"Chance"--constantly speaks the line, "I like to watch." Having spent most of his adult life watching television—his only window on the world—he is referring, of course, to television; but his line is misconstrued by others in the movie, leading to some hilarious situations.

In REAR WINDOW, Jimmy Stewart's "Jeff", a globe-trotting professional photographer, has made a career out of "watching", "looking" at life through the telephoto lens on his camera.

So obsessed with the world he sees through the lens, poor Jeff seems to have, in today's terminology, "commitment issues." He would rather watch the world through his camera than hold the flesh-and-blood Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly), who does everything in her power to pull his focus. 

The great supporting actress Thelma Ritter, as home-health nurse Stella, provides her typical comic relief, but more importantly in REAR WINDOW, she also plays Jiminy Cricket to Stewart’s Pinocchio: she is his conscience, providing sage commentary on what REAR WINDOW is all about: "What people ought to do is get outside their own house and look in for a change."

But Hitchcock knows that we find it endlessly more fascinating to watch others. How often have we heard—or said ourselves: "I like to just watch people. It's the greatest entertainment there is--and it's free!"

In REAR WINDOW, all that watching leads Jeff to begin to connect the dots as to what he sees going on in the apartments beyond the courtyard.

The movies allow us to do something basic to our nature; that is, to watch, to spectate; in essence, to spy.

To stare at the screen.

A screen that does not stare back.

Feeling a little uncomfortable right about now?

Well, they didn’t call the first motion pictures “peep shows” for nothing.

Hoyt Harris, KATC-TV

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